The Legal Issues 111
recall from old L.A. Law episodes. You do not have to find fault
or place blame on your spouse’s personal conduct in order to get
a divorce.
Grounds for Divorce
Marriage is a great institution, but I am not ready for an institution.
—Mae West
The legal grounds for divorce in Hawai‘i are simply that the mar-
riage is “irretrievably broken.” This basically means that you and
your spouse are no longer able to make your marriage work.
Many other jurisdictions use similarly ambiguous but statutory-
sounding phraseology to describe their grounds for divorce. Cali-
fornia uses “irreconcilable differences.” Other jurisdictions use
“incompatibility” as the grounds.
I have never quite figured out what exactly constitutes an irre-
trievable breakdown in a marriage, or what the irreconcilable dif-
ferences are. The bottom line is that when either spouse decides
they want a divorce, they can go out and get it. In a no-fault juris-
diction, it takes only one person to initiate and force the issue.
There is simply no way that someone who wants to resist it can
successfully stop their spouse from divorcing them if they are
really intent on doing so.
The “irretrievably broken” language is something that our emi-
nently wise legislators here in Hawai‘i came up with. California’s
politicians apparently preferred “irreconcilable differences.” Ulti-
mately, it comes down to one party’s judgment call as to when
they feel their marriage is truly over.
The status of the states. Nowadays, only a couple of states (South
Dakota and Illinois) limit divorce to the traditional fault-based
grounds. Of the remaining forty-eight states, nine (Arizona, Califor-
nia, Colorado, Florida, Hawai‘i, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon, and
Wisconsin) have completely abolished fault grounds. The others
have added no-fault grounds to their existing divorce statutes.
Some states use a combination of fault and no-fault grounds.
Other states require the complete agreement of both spouses on